Teachable vs Kajabi

Teachable wins before product-market fit. A first course on Starter at $39/mo, or $29/mo annually, risks $348 across a year instead of $1,716 on Kajabi Basic at the annual rate.

If you do not yet know whether the course sells, that difference is the whole decision.

Kajabi wins after it.

Once the course earns consistently and you are paying for an email platform and a page builder beside it, $179/mo with 0% platform fees against a stack of subscriptions plus Teachable's transaction fee is a close call that usually goes Kajabi's way on both money and maintenance.

Teachable loses on fees, and we cannot tell you by how much, because the percentage is not in our verified snapshot. Kajabi loses on entry price and on having no free plan at all.

If neither answers your case, Kajabi against Thinkific and Teachable against Thinkific bring a zero-fee option into the comparison, and our creator pricing calculators will take your own revenue figures.

Both platforms host courses, take payments, and give you a website to sell from. The difference is how much of the business around the course each one expects to own, and what that costs at the point where you are deciding.

Teachable publishes three self-serve tiers as of our 2026-10-01 check: Starter at $39/mo, or $29/mo billed annually, Builder at $89/mo, or $69/mo annually, and Growth at $189/mo, or $139/mo annually, with a Custom tier above. Annual billing cuts roughly a quarter.

Teachable charges transaction fees on its lower self-serve plans, and the rate is the figure to look up rather than assume.

Kajabi publishes three tiers as of the same check: Basic at $179/mo, or $143/mo billed annually, Growth at $249/mo, or $199/mo annually, and Pro at $499/mo, or $399/mo annually. There is no permanent free plan.

Every tier carries a 14-day free trial with no card required at signup, and Kajabi takes 0% of your sales on all of them.

Payment processing sits outside both platforms. Stripe and PayPal charge their own fee, typically around 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction, on either platform, so that cost is common to both and drops out of the comparison.

Our Teachable review and Kajabi review carry the tier detail, and the course and membership platforms category covers the wider field.

Choose Teachable if you have not sold a course yet. Starter at $39/mo is the cheapest way to put a real course behind a real checkout, and $29/mo on annual billing is cheaper still.

The thing to check before you launch is the transaction fee on the plan you pick, because on a low-priced plan that fee is how the platform makes its money.

Choose Kajabi if the course is already earning and you are maintaining a stack of tools around it. Basic at $179/mo with 0% platform fees, one website, one email tool and one checkout is a defensible bill once you add up the subscriptions it replaces.

Use the 14-day trial to build the funnel you intend to run, not a test page, because the trial is the only free access Kajabi offers.

Compare the entry tiers and the gap is stark: $39/mo for Teachable Starter against $179/mo for Kajabi Basic. That is $140 a month, or $1,680 over a year, before either platform has sold anything on your behalf.

Annual billing narrows it slightly, to $29/mo against $143/mo, which is still $114 a month.

Compare the top self-serve tiers and the gap holds the same direction but changes scale. Teachable Growth is $189/mo, or $139/mo annually. Kajabi Pro is $499/mo, or $399/mo annually.

Kajabi Growth at $249/mo sits closest to Teachable Growth at $189/mo, a difference of $60 a month.

Transaction fees are where the comparison can reverse, and where we will not guess for you. Kajabi's position is simple and verified: 0% on all plans.

Teachable charges a fee on its lower self-serve plans, and because our snapshot does not record the percentage, the honest instruction is to read it off Teachable's pricing page and multiply it by your expected monthly sales.

A fee of a few percent on $5,000 of monthly revenue is the kind of number that closes a $140 gap.

What Kajabi's higher price buys is a smaller stack. One subscription covering the course, the site, the email and the checkout replaces several, which removes both the separate bills and the integration work between them.

Whether that is worth $140 a month depends entirely on what you are already paying for those pieces, which is a number only you have. The course platform comparison guide works through the rest of the field.

Teachable, as checked on 2026-10-01: Starter at $39/mo or $29/mo billed annually, Builder at $89/mo or $69/mo annually, Growth at $189/mo or $139/mo annually, and a Custom tier quoted. Annual billing saves roughly a quarter on each self-serve tier.

Kajabi, as checked on the same date: Basic at $179/mo or $143/mo billed annually, Growth at $249/mo or $199/mo annually, and Pro at $499/mo or $399/mo annually. Annual billing saves roughly a fifth.

All three carry a 14-day free trial with no card required at signup, and none of them takes a percentage of your sales.

Kajabi's 0% platform fee is the clearest verified difference between the two rate cards. Teachable charges transaction fees on its lower self-serve plans.

Our snapshot records that the fees exist but not the percentage, so any margin model you build has to start with the current figure from Teachable's own pricing page.

Free access differs too, and in a way that shapes how you evaluate. Kajabi offers a 14-day trial on every plan and no permanent free tier.

Our Teachable snapshot records no time-limited trial on the paid plans, and its free-plan availability for new signups is not clear in that snapshot, so confirm it with Teachable directly rather than relying on an older comparison article.

Plan tables, fee notes and our check dates sit on the Teachable pricing page and the Kajabi pricing page. Both vendors revise rate cards without notice, so re-check before you commit to an annual term.

Getting a single course live is quick on either platform: upload the lessons, set a price, connect Stripe, publish. The work that takes real time is everything around the course, and that is where the two platforms differ in what they ask of you.

On Teachable you are likely to run an email platform, and possibly a landing page tool, alongside it. That means two or three logins, two or three bills, and an integration between them that you own when it breaks.

The upside is that each piece is replaceable, so a tool you dislike can be swapped without moving the course.

On Kajabi the same work happens inside one account. Email sequences, landing pages, checkout and the course sit together, which removes the integration layer and the separate invoices.

The cost is that replacing any one piece means leaving the platform, so a weakness in, say, the email editor is a weakness you live with.

Migration between the two is manual in both directions. Video files, lesson structure, sales pages and email sequences all rebuild by hand, and student records and active subscriptions are the hardest part, because readers' payment methods sit with the processor under the old platform's account.

Plan any move for the start of a billing month and tell students before you switch. Our guide to selling online courses covers the sequencing.